Transport processes and associated irreversibilities in droplet evaporation

To ascertain the process irreversibility in course of evaporation of a liquid drop in a high-temperature convective medium, the instantaneous rate of entropy production and its temporal variation have been determined from the simultaneous numerical solution of the entropy conservation equation, along with the conservation equations of heat, mass, and momentum transports in both the gas and liquid phases. The accuracy of the present numerical experiments has been established from the comparisons of a numerically generated Nusselt number with the relevant empirical and other numerical values available in the literature. From the numerical predictions, a generalized nondimensional correlation is being proposed to express the instantaneous rate of entropy production as a function of pertinent input parameters for droplet evaporation in a convective ambience. 26 refs.